How to practice Lent to join God’s mission
The season of Lent in the Christian calendar calls us deep into the mission of God. It is so much more than giving up chocolate or coffee or dressing up the sanctuary in purple accessories. Jesus leads us in a descent, all the way to the cross.
Lent calls us into the wilderness because it’s in the wilderness where we find ourselves disoriented enough to crash into our limitations. We tell the truth about our shortcomings and the way our shortcomings ripple out into the world. We tell the truth about the Fall, about the reality of Sin and Death in God’s world.
And we can do this because we know that Easter and resurrection are fast approaching. Sin is real. It is devastating. During Lent we trust that God really, truly is doing something about sin in the world. It’s not up to us.
I don’t think we’re supposed to respond to the invitation of Lent alone.
I don’t take it to be in an individualistic invitation. It’s much too easy to turn Lent into some kind of mechanistic, personal ritual—giving things up out of either personal challenge or guilty conviction. And we wake up Easter morning and everything is back the way it was.
I’m thinking more and more about the ways Lent invites me (maybe pulls me, drags me kicking and screaming) into community and into the work of God making all things new.
Lent presents the opportunity to tell the truth about sin, not only in myself, but also in my community and in God’s world, and to explore those exposed nerves where I’m complicit.
There’s a restaurant in downtown Tulsa where people write all over the walls and seats with markers. One day I noticed the sentence: “I will not be held responsible for the sins of some damn caveman.”
I might want to believe that. I might want to believe that my choices are my business. I might want to believe as long as I don’t hurt anybody then I can do what I want.
But it’s simply not true.
The Fall not only happened, it continues to happen. Daily. And I daily participate. We’re all culpable. We’re all connected. Humanity is a giant enmeshed knot of cause and effect. We are dominoes cascading over one another, pool balls clacking off one another.
But even as my most private sin spins out like a Tasmanian devil wreaking havoc in ways both seen and unseen, so does confession and repentance. Confession and repentance have a cause-and-effect dynamic in the world that brings healing.
Can you imagine the power of a community marked by confession and repentance? One with the courage to say, “This is evil. We acknowledge our complicity. We are deeply sorry. And today we say ‘no more.'”
What might it look like to practice a Lent in community?
What might it look like to practice a Lent for the sake of the world?
Mourning in the midst of brokenness
I spend part of my days at my denomination’s local poverty outreach, where we offer basic groceries and rent assistance to families in need in our community. I get a front-row seat to hearing stories of a bunch of stuff that just should not be. And I’m getting a sense that Lent is a special time for holding that pain of our community before God, mourning, lamenting, “How long, O Lord?”
I asked one of our social workers for some facts and figures about our community, and hear are a couple of things that she shared with me:
A person making minimum wage in Tulsa needs to work 79 hours in order to afford renting a 2-bedroom apartment
More than 1 in 4 Oklahoma children rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps). The average benefit is less than $1.40 per meal.
In 2015, Tulsa’s homelessness overall increased by almost 13% compared to the previous year, despite housing efficiencies and improvements.
Oklahoma’s per-pupil funding for public schools has fallen 26.9 percent after inflation between 2008 and 2017, the deepest cuts of any state in the country, and the margin is widening.
She directed me to OKPolicy.org. Your area may have similar online resources.
The world is not okay. God is not okay that the world is not okay. This is worth lamenting about.
The Bible in Lent
Let’s take a closer look at four Scripture texts often associated with the journey of Lent and see how they might shape an understanding of Lent for mission.
Psalm 51
Here is a classic prayer of confession and repentance.
“Create in me a clean heart, O God.
Renew a loyal spirit within me.”
We read it and find an individual emotionally wrecked by their sin. At a glance, it would be easy to understand from this that sin only disrupts an individual’s relationship to God. In fact, the psalmist expresses, “Against you, and you alone, have I sinned.” But something deeper is at work.
The header offers the context of this psalm as the story of David and Bathsheba. We find that story in 2 Samuel 11 and 12. Should we count the number of human beings affected by David’s sin? Bathsheba, Uriah, the servants who lie for David, the soldiers who die with Uriah, the child that Bathsheba carries—sin wrecks human relationships with tragic unintended consequences. Sin has a rippling effect that tears at the fabric of community.
Like Adam and Eve, David takes something that wasn’t his to take. But unlike Adam and Eve, David owns his wrongdoing. He tells the truth about his sin. In that honesty, there is lament and mourning.
Isaiah 58
There’s no more explicit connection between fasting and God’s mission than this chapter.
Here’s how Eugene Peterson puts Isaiah 58 in the Message:
“This is the kind of fast day I’m after:
to break the chains of injustice,
get rid of exploitation in the workplace.
If you are generous with the hungry
and start giving yourselves to the down-and-out,
Your lives will begin to glow in the darkness,
your shadowed lives will be bathed in sunlight.
You’ll be known as those who can fix anything,
restore old ruins, rebuild and renovate,
make the community livable again” (Isaiah 58:6, 10, 12, The Message)
The argument progresses from a rebuke for spiritual disciplines done badly to social justice to personal healing to community restoration to Sabbath. According to the prophet, fasting done right has the power to change the world. It’s not an admonition not to fast, but rather it’s a warning that fasting can be done very badly. It’s within the realm of possibility that all our fasting in Lent can be a waste of time.
Instead of self-serving piety, true fasting is a response to the hungry, the wrongly imprisoned, the naked, the homeless, and others in trouble.
Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
In the midst of the Sermon on the Mount are these words from Jesus about giving to the needy, prayer, and fasting. The NLT uses the language “good deeds,” while the NRSV uses “practice your righteousness.” The Greek word is dikaiosoune, which is often interchangeably treated as “righteousness” or “justice.” Paul uses it a lot in the book of Romans. It’s the idea that God is making things right in this world. And so, Jesus lumps together giving to the needy, prayer, and fasting as “acts of justice.” These are practices that affect other human beings. They are deeds that “make the world right.”
And, as Jesus says, it’s not if you do these things but when. These are expected practices of Christians for changing the world.
2 Corinthians 5:20b–6:10
Reconciliation is our invitation, not just to God but also to one another. Paul then moves to discuss the wide variety of his experience on behalf of the Gospel: “Our hearts ache, but we always have joy. We are poor, but we give spiritual riches to others. We own nothing, and yet we have everything.”
There is joy. There are riches. There is having everything. There is also heartache. There is being poor. There is owning nothing.
Here we find the counterintuitive, upside-down-ness of God’s kingdom. In entering heartache, we find joy. In being poor, we offer generous abundance to others. In owning nothing, we have everything. Lent reminds us of this reality.
Confession, fasting, justice, reconciliation—these are Lenten themes that propel us into God’s mission in the world.
Lent spotlights all the ways that human beings sabotage our being human. This is why we give stuff up in Lent—so that we can give just a little more time and attention and space for Jesus to show us what it means to be human.
To be with others, to join hands, to together tell the truth about the shadows both in us and around us—what kind of witness might this be to the world around us? How might this open ourselves and those around us to God’s healing in those broken places?
How do our Lenten practices cultivate something in us, so that when the sun rises Easter morning in a few weeks, something brand new comes to life in us and around us?
How can Lent send us out in God’s mission of healing the world?
The world doesn’t need to know what we gave up for Lent. The world desperately needs us to be the kind of people who are shaped by letting go of non-essentials for a season.